This Year’s Cowboys No Better Than Last Year’s Model

Immediately after the 2008 Dallas Cowboys season slammed into a brick wall in Philly at the end of last December, I vented my displeasure with their collapse on this very blog in a post titled, “Five Reasons The Dallas Cowboys Failed in 2008.”

I was certainly under no delusion that Jerry Jones, Wade Phillips and the rest of the team’s so-called braintrust and supposed talent would read my ramblings and take them to heart, but I did hold out faint hope that maybe they would be able to identify some of their obvious shortcomings during an offseason of self-reflection and hit the field in 2009 determined to get things back on track.

Well, after today’s disheartening 17-10 loss to the low-octane Denver Broncos, I think the time has come to revisit my list and see if anything has really changed…

1. There’s no “I” in “TEAM,” but there IS an “I” in “AMERICA’S TEAM.”
This one was primarily directed at the likes of T.O. and Pacman, both of whom are gone.  But it seems as if Roy Williams has managed to assume T.O.’s role of perpetually complaining diva without coming anywhere near matching his production.  Still, the team actually TRIED to address this issue by getting rid of most of the malcontents.  Of course, one wonders how much T.O. managed to infect the rest of the locker room before he left, given such incidents as Marion Barber’s storming out of the stadium in a huff last week after being held out due to his injury.

2. They should have made Tony Sparano an offer he couldn’t refuse.
OK, so maybe Sparano’s lost a bit of his luster with the Dolphins off to a slow start this season, but Jason Garrett continues to baffle Cowboy players and fans alike with his unorthodox and often ill-advised offensive gameplans.  The back-to-back fade routes from earlier this season were only trumped by the back-to-back attempts to SAM HURD with the game on the line this week.

3. The only thing this team showed any consistent commitment to all season was blaming the media for everything.
It doesn’t seem like there’s quite as much team-wide media blaming going on so far this season, but Roy Williams has certainly been more than a little petulant with several reporters and Wade Phillips continues to be as non-forthcoming and evasive as ever during his press conferences – when he’s not downright lying.

4. There’s a reason nobody drafted Tony Romo when they had the chance.
More than any single item on this list, this is the one which has actually gotten appreciably worse since the end of last year.  Romo had a great second half in the season’s first game at Tampa Bay, who have proven to be one of the league’s worst squads.  But other than those two quarters against inferior competition, he has been absolutely atrocious the entire rest of the season so far.  He continues to make poor decisions, turn the ball over at an alarming rate, and generally shows absolutely no leadership qualities whatsoever.  The magic he once displayed is rapidly becoming a distant memory.

5. The head of the snake is still nothing more than a white trash Arkansas bumpkin with an enormous cow chip on his shoulder.
Nothing’s changed on this front, either, and it likely never will as long as Jerry’s drawing oxygen.  His sole focus this entire season has been on that ridiculously garish and overblown shrine to himself in the guise of a stadium.  The fact that so much money has been spent on a stadium which is now hosting nothing more than a mediocre – bordering on inferior – NFL team, seems not to bother Jerry in the least.  Time was, he really seemed to care about winning on the field.  Now, he only cares about winning at the cash register.

I wish there was some tiny glimmer of hope we could cling to that might indicate a possible turnaround, but at this point, it will be nothing short of a miracle if this team finishes any better than 7-9.